Consoles Gaming

Can the PlayStation 4 play PlayStation 3 games? And which PS3 games are available on the PS4?

If you’ve been a loyal PlayStation gamer since the early days, then you may be wondering whether the PlayStation 4 can play PlayStation 3 games. 

The answer is a qualified… “sort of”. You certainly won’t have any joy running your PS3 copy of Batman Arkham Asylum by popping the disk in the drive, but Sony does have options for some PS3 games…

How to play PS3 games on PS4

PlayStation Now

Long before Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Google Stadia, there was a games streaming service called OnLive. It was about ten years ahead of its time, but when it collapsed, Sony bought the underlying technology and another streaming company called Gakai. 

These would eventually become PlayStation Now, a subscription service that lets you stream PS2, PS3 and PS4 titles straight to your current console in 720p – in other words, a bit blurry for modern games, but probably just as you remember the majority of PS2 and PS3 ones. 

There are over 650 games available to stream, so far from the full catalogue, but you might find the title you want in there. A subscription costs £8.99 per month, but you can get a week’s free trial to see if you can cope with the latency involved.

Which PS3 games are available on the PS4? Remastered games…

If the game you’re looking to play is a real classic from the era, there’s a good chance that the money spinners in publishing have rereleased it for PS4, generally in the form of a remaster. 

The quality of the touchups varies wildly, but if you just want the game to run on your PlayStation 4 then you could do a whole lot worse. The list of PS3 remasters includes:

Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection

Batman: Return to Arkham

Burnout Paradise: Remastered

Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition

Bioshock: The Collection

Borderlands: The Handsome Collection

Darksiders: Warmastered Edition

Darksiders 2: Deathinitive Edition

Dark Souls: Remastered

Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition

God of War 3: Remastered

Grand Theft Auto V

Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition

LA Noire

Metro Redux

Okami HD

Heavy Rain/Beyond: Two Souls

Star Ocean: The Last Hope

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition

The Last of Us Remastered

Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition

Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection

Valkyria Chronicles Remastered

WipEout Omega Collection

The future?

There are definitely gaps there, and you might just have to bite the bullet and buy an old PS3 to get your fix if you’re not covered above. Still, they seem to go around the £50-£100 mark on Ebay at the time of writing, so not completely unreasonable.

The good news is that this shouldn’t be a problem with the upcoming PlayStation 5, which Sony says will support the “overwhelming majority” of PS4 games. So no need to flog your games collection when Sony releases it at the end of the year…

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About the author

Alan Martin

Alan has been writing about tech professionally for a decade, and answering tech questions to family members on a voluntary basis for even longer. That should make him an ideal fit for Big Tech Question, then...

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